Hawk watching on the Mokelumne River

On a Friday evening in the middle of August there isn’t much traffic along Franklin Boulevard, an old agricultural road that now cuts through 20 miles of Sacramento, Calif., suburbs. We’re looking for birders along its half-mile length but don’t see anybody or even a parked car.

When a farmer drives his pickup out of a field and stops to lock a gate, I walk over and ask whether he’s seen any hawks or bats in the neighborhood. He sure has, he says, because his family has farmed nearly 400 acres of this land for six generations. They’re Mexican free-tailed bats, he says, and there are 30,000 to 40,000 of them roosting under the bridge right now. The hawks gather when it’s time for the bats to emerge, and we’ll hear them, he assures me.

As if on cue, a Swainson’s hawk screams.

By the time we park and get across the road, four or five Swainson’s have begun circling low over the riparian oak woods. We stand at the bridge’s railing and peer at the floodplain below. A few bats shoot out. Soon a stream of the tiny mammals pours down from under the bridge, and the stream becomes a torrent. Bats swirl into a great boil before making a dash for the nearest oaks, where they rise into the canopy and form ribbons that wind westward into the orange sky.

That’s what the hawks were waiting for. I spot a bird positioning itself above the nearest ribbon of bats, and then it plunges through, talons outstretched. A bat, still flapping, gets caught in a talon. The hawk quickly dispatches the bat and veers back for another pass. Now there’s action all around with thousands of bats unspooling into four great ribbons to fly through this gauntlet of Swainson’s hawks. No, it isn’t only hawks. Two peregrine falcons have joined the hunt. Within minutes all the raptors have bulging crops.

Turning my binoculars toward the distant lead bats, now far out over the valley, I wonder how much longer this remarkable hunt can last. Despite the recession and the efforts of local conservation groups, Sacramento continues to sprawl, gobbling up farmland, grassland, and woodland to spit out legions of McMansions, retirement communities, and strip malls. With each advance of the developers’ bulldozers, Swainson’s hawk habitat is destroyed.

But a more immediate threat may come from the wind. Famous for their long-distance migration of more than 10,000 miles, Swainson’s hawks follow the wind as far south as the Argentine pampas. Energy companies also follow the wind. Seven wind farms have been built in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico, near a stretch of the flyway used by the vast majority of Swainson’s hawks. Thirteen more are in development. Erecting thousands of wind turbines along a major migration corridor would seemingly fail a fundamental requirement for bird-safe wind energy: correct siting. A World Bank document about one of the Tehuantepec wind farms states that “avian impacts are not expected to be significant,” but a case study of another wind farm admits “concern about the potential cumulative impacts of the many additional wind farms planned in the same general area.”

Of course, the dangers posed by wind energy don’t lie just south of the border. California has its own wind farms, and some are notorious for their raptor mortality. Several wind farms -- comprising more than 700 turbines -- have already been constructed in the Montezuma Hills of Solano County, an important part of the Swainson’s hawk’s historic breeding range.

Reviewing a draft environmental impact report for the latest proposed wind farm there, Friends of the Swainson’s Hawk, a wildlife advocacy group, warns, “Over time, the project could have a significant impact on the range of the Swainson’s hawk in California through higher than natural mortality rates and loss of foraging habitat used by nesting Swainson’s hawks to feed their young.” The project would be relatively small at just 50 turbines on about 3,000 acres, but it can only ratchet up the pressure on this threatened, distinctive population of Swainson’s hawk. Some unknown number of birds will be killed each year; more habitat will be lost.

After 25 minutes, the bat exodus is coming to an end. We walk down the bridge, following the last bats across the Mokelumne, and almost run into a peregrine flying toward us. Startled, the bird banks and heads upriver into the night. We turn back toward the car. “Wow,” says my mom, “that was incredible.”

John Berry is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). A Californian, he now works and usually birds in New Jersey.

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Here in Southeast Idaho we have a dilemna of owls being repeatedly killed at night on our highways. So what do we do, we have cars to go see Swainson's hawks, and cars to take us to desert areas to watch antelope and we lament about wind turbines? The problem is the urban developements that continue to gobble up prime areas of habitat everywhere. It is time for people to stop taking every pretty spot and claiming it for themselves because they can't hear the little voice of the animals that claimed it first.

Judith Lamare

Aug 30, 2012 07:47 PM

Problem is birds are a hemispheric resource but the regulation of wind energy is national and very slow to evolve. In California we know that 60-80 golden eagles a year are being killed by wind energy because of increasing monitoring over the years. Now the feds have now determined that wind facilities need eagle permits so that they can exact some mitigation. But there may be no way to replace this level of loss. International corridors are not even well monitored so no telling what the loss will be. Thanks for this interesting and provocative article!